Branko Marcetic at In These Times writes—Why Activists Today Should Still Care About the 40-Year-Old Church Committee Report. The Church Committee Report reveals the lengths the government was willing to go in order to crush grassroots activism and spy on American citizens. An excerpt:
Today, if you go on Twitter, you can find the NSA tweeting about its commitment to recycling, or the CIA joking about still not knowing the whereabouts of Tupac. Why are these once-sinister and little-known spy agencies so eager to put on a friendly face for us? The answer can be traced back to the Church Committee of 1975-76, which forever changed the way Americans looked at the intelligence agencies meant to serve them.
Last week marked 40 years since the final report of the Church Committee was released to the public. You can read its report here. Set up in January 1975 in the wake of Watergate, and shortly after investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the CIA’s role in not only undermining foreign governments but in spying on U.S. citizens, the Committee spent 16 months trawling through classified and unclassified documents and grilling hundreds of counterintelligence officers, CIA directors, FBI higher-ups and other officials in order to shine a light on the scope of the intelligence community’s abuses over the previous decades.
The result was an unprecedented public spotlight on the shadowy world of American intelligence that forever altered the public’s perception of the United States’ various intelligence agencies. This was particularly so with the NSA, whose role and even existence was little-known among the public prior to the Committee’s revelations.
More important was what the Committee actually revealed. Its final report, released on April 26, 1976, detailed a stunningly broad scope of lawlessness and abuses by the intelligence world, which had, under successive presidents, turned its considerable powers increasingly on the American people themselves. Agencies like the CIA and FBI appeared to be acting as governments in themselves, flouting legal restraints as they ran programs that elected officials, even right up to the president, were kept in the dark about.
Most accounts of the Church Committee tend to focus on certain now-infamous programs that have become emblematic of agency abuses. There was the FBI’s COINTELPRO, a program of covert action launched against the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, perceived to be home-grown threats to the social and political order. The program baldly attempted to disrupt and destroy social movements like the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society. It also hatched bizarre schemes like a plan proposed by the FBI to hit printing plants with a substance “duplicating a scent of the most foul smelling feces available.” According to the report, at least 18 percent of the program squarely targeted speakers, teachers, writers and meetings or peaceful demonstrations, as opposed to criminal activity.
There was also the FBI’s warrantless wiretapping program, the NSA’s warrantless collection of telegrams and other international communications and the CIA and FBI’s mail opening programs, which in one case saw more than 215,000 pieces of mail get opened, photographed and filed. Many of these programs were incestuous, with the resulting information being shared among various intelligence agencies and government departments.
Less talked about today are programs like the military’s surveillance of domestic protest groups, maintaining files on at least 100,000 Americans ranging from Jesse Jackson to Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie, or the FBI’s “Custodial Detention List,” a list kept by the FBI of foreigners and citizens to be immediately detained in case war broke out. Perhaps most shocking was the Huston Plan, which in the report’s words called for “the highest political figure in the nation to sanction lawlessness within the intelligence community”—namely, relaxing the rules around surveillance of U.S. citizens and allowing agencies to break into targets’ homes, among other things. The measures were briefly authorized by Nixon, until J. Edgar Hoover convinced the president to change his mind, out of fear that the measures would be discovered and he personally would be thrown under the bus. [...]
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2005—Pentagon Analyst Charged With Passing Secrets To AIPAC:
The shoe dropped on Larry Franklin. In a much anticipated culmination of an investigation that could have wider reaching implications, the Department of Justice arrested Franklin, a man closely associated with Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowoitz:
Federal agents arrested a Pentagon analyst on Wednesday, accusing him of illegally disclosing highly classified information about possible attacks on American forces in Iraq to two employees of a pro-Israel lobbying group.
The analyst, Lawrence A. Franklin, turned himself in to the authorities on Wednesday morning in a case that has stirred unusually anxious debate in influential political circles in the capital even though it has focused on a midlevel Pentagon employee.
The inquiry has cast a cloud over the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which employed the two men who are said to have received the classified information from Mr. Franklin. The group, also known as Aipac, has close ties to senior policymakers in the Bush administration, among them Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who is expected to appear later this month at the group's annual meeting.
The investigation has proven awkward as well for a group of conservative Republicans, who held high-level civilian jobs at the Pentagon during President Bush's first term and the buildup toward the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who were also close to Aipac. They were led by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary who has been named president of the World Bank. Mr. Franklin once worked in the office of one of Mr. Wolfowitz's allies, Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary for policy at the Pentagon, who has also said he is leaving the administration later this year.
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On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin reminds us once again of the difference between #StopTrump & #NeverTrump. Admiral Ackbar, Political Theorist. What might Trump do with classified info? Superdelegates & what to do with ‘em. Is anything the bathroom panickers say that’s even remotely true?
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